This is My City / Esta es Mi Ciudad

This year’s Foundry Dialogues brought artists and social justice communities together to curate 5 dialogues that explore the ways they build lives in NYC. Five ‘teams’ were selected from an application process and given license to determine the content and form of each dialogue — 4 of the 5 teams chose instead to make artistic works as their exploration. This Is My City follows The Foundry’s interest in exploring the relationship between artists and social justice practitioners, and the distinctive approaches we take towards repairing and re-imagining the world we live in.

2010 : Various Sites

Event One

Invisible Women – Rise is a dance theatre piece exploring themes of migration as well as isolation and injustices in the work place. It premiered to at a sold-out benefit for DWU’s Bill of Rights campaign.

DWU believes in the power of art and culture to build unity and raise consciousnes about the struggles of domestic workers. The Foundry’s This is My City has given us an opportunity to carry our voices farther than we ever imagined.

Event Two

Sex in The City – The Flip Side /Sexo en la Ciudad: El Otro Lado

A Theatrical Revue Created and Performed byMembers of The Peter Cicchino Youth Project/Urban Justice Center
with Playwright Lucy Thurber & Director Lear deBessonet

A series of short scenes in which LGBTQQ youth of color shared unique perspectives on policing of gender and sex in New York City, offering a glimpse into lives frequently unseen and unimagined, characterized by resistance, resilience, strength and survival.

The Peter Cicchino youth project @ The Urban Justice Center is excited to collaborate with The Foundry Theatre, as a means to give voice to LGBTQQ youth of color, who are too often silenced subjects of policy debate around “quality of life”, sexual exploitation and the policing and punishment of sex work.

Urban Justice Center

Event Three

More Than a Number / Mas Que un Numero

A Play Created and Performed by
Members of The Center for Immigrant Families
with Playwright Sung Rno & Director Debbie Saivetz

Members of CIF collaborated with Rno and Saivetz to create and perform this play. MORE THAN A NUMBER features a family wrestling with the destabilizing effects of high stakes testing in NY public schools.

CIF is excited to be part of a project that reflects the type of cultural resistance that’s important to our organizing work. After much discussion around the issues our families are facing in public education, we chose to explore the issue of high stakes standardized testing as a key mechanism of inequality in public education. For us this is timely given the impact testing is having on our families, schools and community.

Center For Immigrant Families

The Center for Immigrant Families (CIF) is an inter-generational and collectively-run organization of low-income immigrant women of color and community members in Uptown Manhattan. CIF works to address the challenges facing our communities by linking our personal/psychological well-being, health, and development to organizing that transforms the root causes of the injustices we confront and their multi-layered impacts. CIF builds power and leadership among low-income parents of color to take back and transform our schools and demand a public education system that truly serves our children.

Event Four

A communal meal and discussion, celebrating FUREE’s powerful housing and food access campaigns in downtown Brooklyn. 28 playwrights prepared and served a meal to FUREE members who in turn wrote and performed a play for the occasion.

"The Foundry Theatre is a company not a building. We produce our shows in theatres
and uncommon venues throughout NYC - from St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn to peoples' living
rooms in all 5 boroughs, on a bus touring the South Bronx to La Mama in Manhattan's East
Village. We make theatre everywhere. Come find us."